Future ofthe Future9 Aug. 2018

Future of the Future Business Conference 2018, Auckland

Predicting the future is an enviable talent – impossible, perhaps, but that shouldn’t stop us making educated guesses. Today, business is being reinvented at an unprecedented pace; we’re standing at the precipice of massive change. The gig is up for some traditional business models and the gig economy is about to go global, and we know that the business landscape of the future is going to look, and feel, very different.

That’s not just a hollow statement. Consider Virtual or Augmented Reality infused with empathy, software that knows how you feel, the golden age of coding, the influence of data on entertainment, and entertainment on sales, and new ways of connecting with peoples and their needs in meaningful (and non-creepy) ways.

We think the best people to shed light on the future of business are those that are working to define what it might look like. Join our Future of the Future congress and hear some of the world’s leading creative, technical and social visionaries from the world’s most disruptive companies – Uber, Google, Netflix, Airbnb and Facebook – share their knowledge and insight about what to expect next.

What should New Zealand companies be thinking about to ensure success and relevance in 20, 30 or even 50 years? Join the Future of the Future Business Conference 2018, in Auckland and give your team a head-start that will move them forward with confidence into this rapidly changing world.

New Zealand’s favourite business commentator, Rod Oram will moderate the panels.

Meet the persondriving changeat Uber

Uber’s new VP of Design, Michael Gough is a former architect who wants to make the sometimes maligned company more empathetic. The future of Uber is far from determined, and the decisions and actions of Gough will help define it.

“The core of design is empathy. That’s the starting point no matter what. That will always be how you address any product challenge. The classic way products were developed was you solved functional needs, and then maybe business needs, and then you lean heavily into human needs over time. This arc, all of the [PR] challenges aside, is a natural arc. The next big step is to become a company that’s really, really good at connecting with people and people’s needs.”

Meet the personexploring the limitsof AI at Facebook

Conversations about Artificial Intelligence typically revolve around whether advanced algorithms will wipe out all our jobs. But what if the rise of automation isn’t a zero-sum game? What if AI could enhance, support and inspire human creativity and accelerate the creative process. At this Future of the Future talk, Julia will discuss the promise of AI as a productivity tool able to augment human ability ­– consider this a don’t miss event for any tech-informed or tech-interested executive teams and designers. Julia specialises in AI Design, and Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team has been undertaking ground breaking research into art, VR film (create your own story and, as you watch, change it) and fashion, where an especially interesting case involved FAIR, working with a luxury fashion brand, harnessing advancements in the field of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate 4,000 original, creative and compelling images of fashion items from scratch ­– garments that were both wearable and artistically unique in style, shape, texture and pattern harnessed. These designs won’t be seen on the catwalk, but they have led to insights on technology’s future role in creativity, idea production, and the ways that AI can help designers create new and unique pieces that fit within a specific brand’s aesthetic.

Julia Peter is an award-winning product designer on the Artificial Intelligence Design team at Facebook.

At Facebook, Julie works with research scientists and engineers, pushing boundaries and questioning current realities to develop breakthroughs in the field of AI.

Always at the forefront of Julia’s design thinking is a goal to fully understand the power of this new technology, in order to reinforce the moral and social responsibility that comes with it.

Julia has more than ten years of interactive design experience, working with leaders from within the industry including the Sony Design Center and Google.

Meet the personwith her head in thecloud at Google

Today we see major shifts occurring in how people work - where a worker’s relationship can be with a platform not an employer - flexible, not full time. Where more and more businesses have moved to cloud computing - making access to project information and team collaboration ubiquitous yet secure - work has left the office.

As we reimagine workplace environments and redesign the very products we use to do our work, designers are faced with the challenge of creating not just an app or a tool but ecosystems of intelligent multi-surface apps, data services and cloud-enabled platforms. Emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and access to big data are changing the work of designers faster than ever before. As jobs and workplaces evolve, Google leads the world in defining and demonstrating the role of business, education and technology in finding new ways to collaborate and ensure the future of work offers opportunity for everyone.

What does the future of the workplace look like? When AI is in full swing, and our digital assistants are streamlining our workloads, what will we be doing at work? As Director of UX Design for Google Cloud, these are the sorts of questions Sara Ortloff Khoury has dedicated herself to answer.

At Google, Sara leads R&D teams developing products and services to help people and businesses thrive. It’s a development role that involves building empathy into AI, so that tomorrow’s digital assistants are less HAL and more helpful, empowering and empathetic.

Before joining Google, Sara honed her UX skills in high-performance research and design teams at Bay Area start-ups, agencies, global consumer retail and banking companies.

Yan is a senior design lead for Google Cloud, developing products and services that empower people and businesses to thrive and be productive.

Before joining Google, Yan began his career as an architect, working for an interdisciplinary design firm in San Francisco designing complete environments (planning, landscape & architecture). In 2005, he joined Autodesk to become a ux designer and eventually grew into the role of UX Architect, leading the web and mobile design strategy for the AutoCAD product line group.

Yan has lived in France, Germany and California. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Meet the persondesigning the waywe stay at Airbnb

In today's world companies have a keen desire to launch products with the goal of worldwide scale. Indeed, many global companies design products that address billions of people across the world. Often, in order to accomplish this, they design for "users" in general. This makes perfect sense considering their ability to drive revenue by delivering a product that meets everyone's general needs. But the solutions often end up feeling generic and commoditized. People don't love them, but they bear with them to get their job done.

At Airbnb, we've taken an alternative approach. We start with a vision for the ideal experience people will love done in a way that authentically reaffirms our brand. From the app to marketing to merchandising to real-world services we provide, we take the time and care needed to tell a story as compelling as it is honest. We iterate internally to build to our vision, launch it, and then - if it works - we determine a path towards scaling. In other words, we design first for love, not for scale.

In my talk I'll dive into a number of projects where we designed for the ideal vs scale and provide a behind-the-scene look into the work and the process that have supported a number of Airbnb's most recent products. We'll focus specifically on the design of Airbnb Experiences and Airbnb Plus, two products that have fundamentally shifted Airbnb's business into new verticals and market segments. The audience will see how we brought both products from concept to reality, how product design and our art/marketing department crafted the message, and how we evolved Airbnb’s brand in the process.

Ethan Eismann leads the Airbnb product design team – a 180-strong phalanx of passionate designers, researcher, writers and producers that is working together to develop exceptional products that will improve the way you stay around the world.

Like Uber, Airbnb has fast become a verb as well as a company. You might Uber from A to B, but when you get where you’re going you’ll probably “Airbnb it”.

At Airbnb, Ethan leads UX around home sharing, developing new products, programmes and collections that help make finding accommodation – or renting it – that much easier.

Prior to Airbnb, Ethan led the global product design team at Uber and Google’s shopping, travel and payments UX teams.